Liner Notes

Liner Notes for the 2006 Edition
by noted author Matthew Greenwald

According to Graham Nash, David Crosby’s first solo record, If I Could Only Remember My Name . . . . , is “the perfect organic listening experience.” Without exaggerating, that description is just about flawless. The album is a timeless excursion into musical territory beguiling, strange, and most of all, beautiful.


By 1970 David Crosby was already responsible for more than a few handfuls of musical milestones. Aside from being a founding member of The Byrds, he had also contributed several of his own songs to their canon that broadened the folk/rock/pop canvas beyond any recognition of the genres. “Everybody’s Been Burned,” “Lady Friend,” “Renaissance Fair,” and “Tribal Gathering” are just a few swoops from Crosby’s pre-1968 pen that were among the most revolutionary music of their time. They introduced listeners to a new and adventurous composer who brazenly crossed styles and expanded musical restrictions with righteously unique and spellbinding results. Literate and probing lyrics, modal tunings mingled with jazz chords and timings, as well as an occasional medieval feel and flavor, overflowed in David Crosby’s creations, going far beyond what was branded mere “folk rock.”


With the formation of Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young) in 1968/9, Crosby had further room to evolve, and he used it wisely. With sympathetic partners (particularly Graham Nash as a harmony accomplice), songs such as “Guinnevere,” “Déjà Vu,” and “Wooden Ships” raised the level of the game and soundtracked the Aquarian/apocalypse zeitgeist that was the late 1960s.


By mid-1970, with CSN&Y temporarily in dry dock, Crosby began work on his own album at Wally Heider’s San Francisco recording studio with Stephen Barncard, who had just finished mixing and coproducing the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty. The two had met the year before, when Barncard worked as an assistant behind Bill Halverson on CSN&Y’s Déjà Vu.


The sessions that yielded If I Could Only Remember My Name . . . . found Crosby at a point in his life where on one hand he was basking in the glow of the mammoth artistic and commercial success of CSN&Y, and on the other dealing with the devastating and sudden loss of his girlfriend, Christine Hinton (to whom the album is dedicated), who died in a tragic car accident in the autumn of 1969. In a way, this duality mirrored the times in both their beauty and tragedy. The glory of the Woodstock Nation and a set of new, alternate values and lifestyles that Crosby’s music was so much a part of was set against the tarnished paint stroke that was Manson, Altamont, Kent State, the deaths of Hendrix and Joplin, and a seemingly endless war in Vietnam.


“I think it was a polarization,” Crosby says today. “It was a time of extremes; there was no question about it. It was extreme joy and extreme creativity on the positive end, and a lot of giving and a lot of getting rid of fear, and a lot of love. On the other side there was some terrible stuff going on: the Manson murders, the war, and the drugs taking some of our best and killing them.”


With that said, it’s amazing that If I Could Only Remember My Name . . . . is the cohesive and consistently brilliant record it is. But the truth of the matter is that the greatest artists truly shine when they step up to the plate in the strangest environments, and shine Crosby does—with a lot of help from his friends. Members of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana as well as David Frieberg, Graham Nash, Neil Young, and a host of others, all contributed to the glorious, free-floating results here.


“That had a lot to do with San Francisco at that time,” says David. “One of the reasons I liked San Francisco better then was that there was a friendship between the musicians rather than everyone competing and being cutthroat with everyone . . . it was a community of people who were more than willing to help each other, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane in particular. They would help each other, they would help me, other people, and in so doing, we would do what I call ‘cross-pollination’ of idea streams, and this was a very healthy thing for the music. Here was a group of people who really believed in that kind of ethic. Paul Kantner in particular, Grace Slick, David Frieberg, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and the drummers of the Dead—they were all just very generous about how they looked at things, and they didn’t see music as something that you ‘owned’ . . . it was something that you did.”


Aside from the quality of the music and performances, this album is also an evergreen because of its incredible sonic depth and clarity, now even more apparent on this new 5.1 mix. Mention must be made here of Stephen Barncard, who threw out the standard engineering rulebook and followed the music. “Some of the best music I’ve ever heard,” reflects Barncard, “let alone be involved in. I think one of the first things we did was ‘Laughing’ or ‘Orleans,’ and it was just him and his acoustic guitar, and we layered on vocals, and it just clicked, and we knew we were on to something pretty good here. Sometimes it was just me and David, sometimes it was ten people, and I never, ever knew what was going to happen each night. I quickly developed a technique, because I knew the guy was demanding. I knew in advance that he wanted to record everything . . . I already knew that, so I set up a wall of tape machines . . . a 16-track 3M, an eight-track 3M, a couple of two tracks, and by then I had a cassette machine to make him a nightly copy he would go home to his boat in Sausalito and listen to all night. I had a wall of machines set up and a few microphones set up, but, as I said, I never knew what we were going to do.”


“That’s what I asked him to do,” concurs Crosby. “I asked him to be ready for anything all the time and also to have a two-track running constantly, a log tape to record everything, because there was just stuff happening all the time.”


Quite a bit of that serendipity and “stuff” that David is referring to ended up on the finished record, one of the greatest examples of a collective musical community fanning their plumage in the service of one of its prime exponents.


—Matthew Greenwald


Matthew Greenwald would like to thank Cros, Graham Nash, Stephen Barncard, Joel Bernstein, _Michael Simmons, Thomas Jones, D.W. Quinn, A.M. & L.B. Holland, J. Shapiro, and S. Love.

TRACK-BY-TRACK COMMENTARY


Compiled by Matthew Greenwald

MUSIC IS LOVE


David Crosby: A joyous accident. I was showing them a lick on the 12-string, and Neil and Graham started singin’ along with it, and we wound up improvising that piece. The vocal was all live improvisational, too.

COWBOY MOVIE


Crosby: Metaphorically, the story of CSN&Y breaking up—and the various players are in there if you know them and want to figure ’em out. A wonderful accident also in that we had no idea how that was going to turn out. I did have the song written, and Jerry and I would play it, and we played it with just us and the [Grateful Dead’s] rhythm section. Both lead guitars are Jerry.

Stephen Barncard: Garcia might have been working on his solo record in the back room [at Heiders], and he started hanging out and coming in. It was interesting to see the Dead be . . . not sycophants, but just standing by and waiting, and being there almost at David’s beck and call. They were truly awed by what strange lands David led them through. The chemistry was so good and the songs were so good that everyone really enjoyed the hang . . . and the Dead usually never hung out at someone else’s session.

TAMALPAIS HIGH (AT ABOUT 3)


Crosby: A piece that I wrote and no words came forth. And so I took a chance and just did it using vocals as horn stacks. I think I did that one before I did “Song With No Words.” I had ’em both before I went into that record, and CSNY didn’t really relate to that. Nash did, but Stephen and Neil didn’t really at the time. So I did that one first. I thought it was just magical.

LAUGHING


Crosby: Written to and for George Harrison about the Maharishi, and the idea was telling him that nobody’s really got “the answer,” and that people [who] try to tell you that they have the answer are most often trying to manipulate you in some fashion or another. I think that the Maharishi was one of the more benevolent of those people than most, certainly more than the one who has 20 Rolls-Royces or whatever, like the Reverend Moon and some of the other lovelies that are out there manipulating human beings. I was just trying to tell George that there wasn’t an external fix. The closest you can get to it is looking at children:_they’ve got more of an answer than any religion I ever saw.

The real fun of that one, and the track, which is wonderful—Lesh, wow, he played so great on that; it’s so beautiful—but aside from that, there was a really wonderful part where we put the vocals on at the end there. There were a number of people on there, but you can certainly notice where Joni’s contribution is . . . and that came out beautiful. I like the song, I like what it says, and I loved the track and I loved the vocals in that climb-out at the end.

Barncard: On Garcia’s pedal steel, I just put some echo on it and printed it as we recorded it . . . I like to print effects to tape because it travels with the overdubs. It’s always there, it’s part of the music. If Jerry didn’t like parts of his steel track, I’d bring down the fader and remember the moves. He just went, “Whoa.” We just kind of looked at each other; we knew it was right in those places. There’s even that major/minor clash that he plays near the end that’s followed by the biggest, fattest steel chord in history. We just had to leave it all in at that point.

WHAT ARE THEIR NAMES


Crosby: Again, an unbelievably fortuitous circumstance, because we played that track as it was, with that gap in it, just organically, having fun in the room. And then later I wrote those words on an airplane, and I came back, and they fit like a hand going into a glove. Then I got a whole gang of people in there, and we sang ’em: Grace and Paul, David Frieberg, Nash, me, and probably Laura Allen.

TRACTION IN THE RAIN


Crosby: A really fine recording experience, because it was only two guitars and the autoharp, which is played by Laura Allen. What Laura would do is, she would take an autoharp and take the keys off it and tune it to an open tuning, which matched the tuning of the song. She would do that and play in that tuning, and it was a delicious sound. Nash had this wonderful little rhythmic pulse going, so we had this really great sound on the guitars—credit to Stephen Barncard, as I don’t think anyone recorded an acoustic guitar better than him. I think they’re the best I’ve ever heard, truthfully.

SONG WITH NO WORDS (TREE WITH NO LEAVES)


Crosby: Nash and I have sung that song many, many times, but, again, that was one of the best recording experiences I’ve ever had, and was certainly was the quintessential one of that record and that time right then, because that was members of Santana, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and CSN&Y all contributing to one piece, and that was just wonderful.

ORLEANS


Crosby: I learned that from Paul Kantner around this time. It’s a French children’s song, and it’s a series of names of cathedrals in France. I loved the guitar thing I did after it, the little picking melody that follows the vocal. It was two six-strings, and I played ’em both—that’s the Mormon Tabernacle Dave.

I’D SWEAR THERE WAS SOMEBODY HERE


Crosby: This was one of the most spooky recording experiences you could probably have. When I was warming up to do something, I’d ask Stephen to turn on the spectacular echo chamber they had at Wally Heiders. A real chamber, not plate echo or digital echo; a real echo chamber. I would have him turn it on, and I would fool around with the echo. I was in a good place in my head, and I was high as a kite. I’d just smoked a joint and I was out there, and all of a sudden had a feeling Christine was there, that her spirit was in the room at that moment, and it was a very, very powerful feeling. At that same time, I started singing that stuff. Those are six different parts, each about two minutes long, and it took about 13 minutes in real time to record the whole thing. It was one after another after another after another, and I improvised the whole thing. It’s very spooky, but it’s also one of the nicest pieces of music that I thought up.

Matthew Greenwald